Florida’s open-seat House races aren’t that open

WASHINGTON — When it comes to congressional races, millions of Florida voters won’t have much of a choice this fall.

There are nine open seats on the November ballot — one-third of the state’s House delegation. Only one, however, is expected to be remotely in play: the 18th District along the Treasure Coast where Democrat Patrick Murphy is leaving to run for U.S. Senate.

Unseating House incumbents remains a formidable task, even in an era when public approval of Congress is dismally low. Political parties generally view open seats as rare opportunities to pad their majorities or retake the House.

Don't look for that to happen in the Sunshine State this year — even though Florida is the purplest of presidential swing states, and even though congressional districts were recently redrawn after voters approved a constitutional amendment designed to end gerrymandering.

“The real story (of the fall elections) is, there’s not a lot of competition even after redistricting and with all these incumbents who have voluntarily left or been defeated in the primary,” said Daniel A. Smith, a political scientist at the University of Florida in Gainesville. “Where you saw the competition with the open seats was the primaries.”

Virtually every Florida district with an open-seat race this year is dominated by one party, according to the Cook Political Report, an independent publication that tracks elections.

Cook uses a “partisan voter index” to determine how strongly a congressional district leans Democratic or Republican based on past presidential voting patterns. A district that leans more than three points one way or the other is considered relatively safe for that party's nominee.

Six of Florida's nine districts with open-seat races this year favor one party — five Republican, one Democratic — by at least 10 points. A seventh comes in at plus-nine Democratic. The 9th District in central Florida is plus-three Democratic but isn't considered competitive for Republicans because of its growing Hispanic population.

That leaves Murphy’s Treasure Coast district the only toss-up.

David Wasserman with the Cook Political Report said the lack of competitive districts in Florida and elsewhere is because of a “cultural sorting” in which like-minded voters and members of individual demographic groups increasingly cluster together.

“In order to draw a competitive seat, you really have to go out of your way these days because voters are so segmented into solidly blue and solidly red areas,” he said.

That segmentation is true outside Florida as well.

A Washington Post poll this month found that more than half of Virginians who support either Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton in the presidential race don't know people backing the opposing candidate. Fifty-four percent of Trump voters said they have no Clinton supporters in their social circle. And 60 percent of Clinton backers said the same of Trump voters.

And it’s not just open seats.

Of the 18 House races in Florida where an incumbent is running for re-election, only two are considered close calls — the 19th District race pitting GOP Rep. David Jolly against former Gov. Charlies Crist in Pinellas County, and the 26th District race in which Democrat Joe Garcia is trying to reclaim his old seat from Republican Rep. Carlos Curbelo.

It’s hard to gin up enthusiasm for House races when parties and donors are pouring so many resources into Florida for the presidential and Senate campaigns. The state could be key to deciding both the White House contest and which party controls the upper chamber of Congress.

“The oxygen for Florida politics is being breathed into the presidential and U.S. Senate race,” said Susan MacManus, political science professor at the University of South Florida. “And the congressional races are really not getting massive attention.”

Smith said outsiders often believe every Florida race is a nail-biter, but that's a misperception.

“We’re a very heterogeneous state in terms of the overall population but we are geographically concentrated by race and ethnicity, by urban and rural and by partisanship,” he said. “Even though we’re a purple state, when you narrow down to congressional or state Senate or House districts, they become less competitive.”

Open seats

Florida has nine open congressional seats in the November election. But most are considered non-competitive because one party dominates the district. This list shows the open seats, the departing incumbent, and how strongly the district leans one way or the other using the Cook Political Report's Partisan Voter Index based on past presidential election patterns: